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Susan Pevensie is a girl without a past. The time before the war is too long ago to remember in clarity, and the other memories, ones of snow and the forest and a throne are too painful for her to conjure.
Now there’s a classroom and a desk and a school uniform that is too small for this foreign body she left behind so long ago. He hair is too short, barely touching her shoulders. Oddly, she can remember the feeling, the way it hung down her back, the feeling of the coils of her hair.
It’s never been that long. Not in this world, anyway.
The city of London is a memory from another lifetime. Up until last year, this world has seemed the strange dream, the impossible reality. Now her mind struggles to strain back to her home, her first life, the people she knew.
For a while, she clings to her siblings, small snatches of memory. For the first few days, they sleep in the same bed, all four of them. They stayed up at night and share the stories of Narnia after they returned, whispering them as their eyelids fell heavily, getting the words out on whispering breaths. As if speaking of their friends, or the world they had left behind would conjure it, as if to convince themselves it was real.
For Susan, it does neither.
She hugs the woman she calls mother on her way to school and sits silently at the back of the classroom. She can just remember a time when she gave orders when she was bowed to. Now she keeps her gaze down from the teachers’, tries not to speak- her words are of a different time, a different age.
“What did you do, swallow a dictionary when you were in the country?” her classmates ask. They were once her friends – for a year or maybe two before they left and everything was different. Their faces nestle in the mist of that time, half reality, half fantasy that becomes clearer every day.
“There wasn’t much else to do,” Susan says sweetly.
She made the mistake once, a few times, of greeting an animal in the street. Now she bites her tongue and keeps her smiles to herself.
Eyes follow her wherever she goes, eyes of boys she would have called children only a year ago. Soon, her friends stop trying to talk to her. She likes to be left alone, except for her siblings. Lucy flourishes wherever she is: always hopeful and believing, perfecting her gap-toothed smile. Peter fights and Edmund wins every card game he plays. None of them truly know what to do with themselves: out of sync with a world that is no longer their own.
Allowances have to be made, they say, after all, they had difficult childhoods, going away to the country. It is understandable they came back a bit wild.
But all the other children who went away come back broken, humbled. The Pevensie’s stand taller, stronger. They speak in words the teachers don’t know, walk into rooms as if they owned them. People whisper as they pass by, unkind words muttered under their breath.
After a while, it starts to feel like a rhythm. Susan can wake up and get dressed without stirring in confusion at the small room, at the odd feeling of a younger body. She can greet her friends without forgetting their names, can remember the route they walk to school.
But then they’re back. Narnia. It is as if everything that had been sleeping in her suddenly wakes up, and she’s alive again. She’s a queen again. Her muscles sigh as she releases her first arrow. This is right she can feel it in the wind and Aslan’s roar and she’s happy, everything finally makes sense.
And there’s Caspian – and it isn’t love, not yet, but it is something that might be. Where she wants there to be. She’d be Queen again, and she would be in Narnia, and everything, everything would be as it should be.
Then it’s over. Back to the dark, desperate world. Faster than she had time to really enjoy it, before she even had time to register she was there.
This time, there isn’t the sadness or the mourning: there is only anger and bitterness. She sees her siblings sit in circles and repeat their stories or re-enact sword fights. She smiles at their imaginations. She trades armour and bow for lipstick and nylons. If she’s of this world, she’ll enjoy every part of it. She doesn’t change her walk, this time, she remains forever regal. There’s a knowing behind her innocent smile, as her friends get her to buy their drinks and she attracts older men even with her young girl’s body and never once feels small in comparison.
(at night, she takes a small silver blade to the inside of her wrist: the old her’s wrist. The scar she got from the battle with the Telmarianes is gone, but she carves it again. Tally marks for the lost years, for the lost faces. The blood runs red and she remembers Narnia but then it heals and it’s gone, and she falls asleep again.)
She makes friends with those who think they’re too old for her, that they’re corrupting her. I’ve done this all before she thinks as she dances, flesh against flesh, the music in her ears never quite loud enough to block out the sound of the thoughts, the memories. Its still war time and there are still rations but she still gets her nylons and lipstick and perfume and when their mother asks how, she just smiles and winks with knowledge beyond her years.
Peter frowns when her admirers call the house, when she disappears from the room to speak to them on the phone, laughing, pretending. He clenches his fist, remembering a time when he could challenge such men to a duel. When Susan wouldn’t look at such scum twice. He longs for them more on the days Susan’s make-up runs with tears, when she finds him one day, clothes ripped and dishevelled and climbs into his bed, wordlessly. She’s gone when he wakes up.
Edmund watches from his window when she returns in the early hours of the morning, hair rumpled and makeup smudged. He never speaks to her, he doesn’t need to. One look in his eyes and she can tell what he’s thinking: “Why do you make yourself small?” again and again, as she pretends that’s she’s shallow and vapid and everything that they want. He sees her eyes glaze over, slowly, with every day. She stops looking to him: he doesn’t understand, none of them do.
She pretends she doesn’t notice that Lucy spends all her time in the pathetic little square of land they call a garden, that she talks to the plants and the trees when no one is looking, that her little, now bigger sister, pushes the rations of meat around her plate, unable to stomach meat. Christmas eve, Mother comes home, triumphant: venison is on their dinner plate that evening.
Susan hold’s Lucy’s hair as she vomits into the night, scouring her insides of any trace. Susan tells herself it’s just food poisoning, it doesn’t matter.
She doesn’t go to church the next day. She has no interest in looking up at the golden cross and imagining a throne: of being told to be grateful. She doesn’t believe in Aslan, she tells herself – that is her sibling’s game. She doesn’t want to. You abandoned us, she wants to scream. Showed us everything and gave us none of it.
Her other siblings look at her sadly, but don’t argue. She spends Christmas day with her friends, dancing and celebrating and forgetting the time she was ever unsure.
She’s crowned Queen at their school dance. Part of her remembers a heavier crown, stored in the back of a wardrobe in the country. But she’s here, now. The eyes, the adoration feels natural. She preens under it.
Slowly, the time before folds away into dull memory. No looking back, only forward.
Peter and Edmund sign up to the army, Lucy trains as a nurse. The war ends and there’s a celebration, but Susan isn’t with any of them. She’s with her friends, trying not to compare the end of this war to the other wars she knows, stopping any unwelcoming memories from resurfacing.
She’s living in this world.
She kisses her best friend, lips small and soft beneath her touch, the curves of her body fitting comfortably against hers. It isn’t something a Queen would do. She loses herself in it. She’s not gentle, She’s Susan, breaker of hearts, liver of life. Her lipstick is smudged and there are rips in her nylon stockings.
She doesn’t say goodbye when they leave on the train.
There’s a knock on her door that evening. A crash. Three bodies.
She digs a bottle of alcohol out from under her bed, and swigs.
Her siblings will never be older. Peter will never be able to grow a full beard; Edmund’s shoulders will remain too broad for his small body. Lucy’s feet will never reach the floor when she sits down but always swing. Her siblings never left behind their childhood, their dreams of a better place, a better country, the games they played to distract themselves from the bitter truth of war and death.
In her mind, she can picture them perfectly, grown-up. She can imagine a time, where there wasn’t the war or the pain and they were together, older, happy.
When she wakes up, head pounding, she’s alone, lying in her wardrobe, clothes strewn across the floor of her room, and throat sore as if she’s been screaming. It isn’t grief she feels: it’s betrayal. Abandonment.
She’s been left behind.
She stands up, smooths herself off. Ignores the claw marks that are now etched into the wood of the back of her wardrobe and her broken nails and tearlessly picks out her favourite black dress and lipstick to wear to their funeral.
It’s a small affair. In another lifetime, in another world, there would have been thousands to attend. She can’t remember the last time she was in a church. The stone absorbs the sound and leaves the thoughts echoing in her head.
She thinks, the glimpse of a thought: Narnia stole everything from us, in the end. And when that wasn’t enough, He took their lives. The injustice of it fills her up with fury- more than the knowledge that they left her willingly. That if Aslan called, they would have stepped in front of the moving train themselves. Somehow, she’s alive, but she’s the tragedy. Because she had the nerve to live for herself and not the ghosts that dance on the periphery of her memory.
The thoughts are madness – its grief, she tells herself – grief bringing back the stories they told themselves as children. Her siblings never did quite recover, to shed away fairy tales: never did learn to live in the world. The war broke them.
Nothing breaks her. She thought. But this- it reaches inside her ribcage and tears out her heart.
This isn’t how it is meant to be.
She stays, long after everyone has left. She pulls off her stockings to sit on the wet grass that carves patterns into her skin. A song dances across her lips in a lost language, a tune she doesn’t know anymore. Afterwards, she sits in silence, pretending for Lucy’s sake that she can make words out of the wind in the trees, that animals linger on the edge of the field as if to wish them farewell.
She walks home in the rain, barefoot.
For once, when she goes to sleep in cotton sheets, she doesn't long for a time that they were silk.